1999 - Opening Remarks

Rafael Tovar,
President of the National Council for Culture and the Arts,
Mexico

It is a great honor for Mexico today to be the second venue for the annual meeting of the member countries of the International Network on Cultural Policies.

On behalf of the President of Mexico, Dr. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, I welcome you most cordially to our country and wish you the best of stays here, and also that the work of this meeting will be of the greatest benefit for the countries you represent, for the Network that gathers you here, and for each one of you personally.

We believe that the concern of various countries, which gave rise to this important forum a year ago, will find in this place, in the state and city of Oaxaca which receive us today, the most favorable framework for analysis, reflection and dialogue.

Oaxaca is a state of the Mexican Republic that is representative of the cultural richness and diversity that characterize Mexico as an essentially multicultural and pluriethnic country.

Inhabited by the largest indigenous population in the country, belonging to different ethnic and linguistic communities speaking 15 of the more than 60 indigenous languages that are still spoken in Mexico, and because of a population that gives an account of our complex mixing of races over the past five centuries, Oaxaca offers a faithful image of the history of Mexico and its past and present culture, which have left here, and continue to produce, very rich testimonies.

In particular, this Ex-Monastery of Santo Domingo, built in the sixteenth century, has great significance. A year ago, after being the object of one of the greatest restoration projects of this decade in Mexico, it reopened its doors as the Santo Domingo Cultural Center which accommodates us today.

This major work of architectural rescue and restoration represents a new model of collaboration in our country between the public sector, the private sector, the cultural community and civil society in the preservation of our cultural heritage and in its fitting out as an ideal enclosure for the development of the most diverse facets of cultural life.

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In this regard, this place is particularly representative of Mexican cultural policy and of the importance Mexico places on culture as a fundamental component of its social development policy, which integrates and closely links the different basic services provided to the population as requirements for quality of life, well-being and national development.

An essential part of Mexico’s cultural policy is also an ongoing dialogue with other countries and regions of the world, as is fitting for a culture which, like Mexican culture, like the culture that is fully visible here in Oaxaca, has been open throughout its history to encounter, combination and fusion with different peoples, without distinction, and with currents and traditions from all regions of the world.

Mexico therefore enthusiastically welcomed the idea of being the host country for the International Network on Cultural Policies, which was the valuable result of the ministerial meeting on international cultural cooperation held in June 1998 in Ottawa, and promoted and sponsored by the Minister of Canadian Heritage, Sheila Copps, in order to enrich discussion and contribute to implementing the plan of action adopted that same year by the Intergovernmental Conference on Cultural Policies for Development organized by UNESCO in Stockholm.

In this context, far from replacing or duplicating mechanisms, forums or actions that already exist for international debate, exchange and cooperation in the cultural field, the Network on Cultural Policies aims to be an innovative formula that complements them and acts in coordination with them. Its particular characteristics afford it the possibility of contributing especially effective and favorable forms and ways of studying the many topics appearing on the horizon of culture and cultural development in the world.

The open and flexible nature of the Network as a mechanism for permanent contact and exchange of information focuses precisely on favoring a close, free and positive dialogue on the concerns shared by the participating countries. This is reflected by the concept of its annual meetings, conceived as a small working group that in an encounter of an informal nature can truly go deeply with full freedom into the most important topics and aspects of the international cultural agenda.

We consider it necessary to stress that this new proposal is not an isolated initiative. In practically the entire world, today we can see concerns and attempts to generate new ways and forums for communication between countries and regions. In an era marked by a deep and growing interconnection between the different countries which succeeds in prevailing over ideological differences or the interests that previously separated them, the need can be perceived to find new, fluid channels in keeping with the pace and new forms of exchanges taking place in politics, economics, science and technology and information and communication.

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It is natural for this search for new forms of communication to be even greater in the field of culture.

We are undoubtedly witnessing the beginning of a stage of profound cultural changes and redefinition of the role of culture in the transformations that the world is undergoing and will undergo. If one of the major achievements of the tasks related to cultural affairs was, in this century, the specialization they reached and the social awareness they managed to awaken, in the coming century it is most likely that we will witness an inevitable interconnection or era of synergy and cross-fertilization of the most diverse fields of activity of human knowledge.

The decisive revolutions taking place in the field of science, for example, have inevitable consequences in man’s cultural dimension, and at the same time culture is capable of having an influence on their orientation and on the definition of their possibilities and their limits. While the scientific revolution and the information technology revolution prepare the radical changes in human life that characterize the twenty-first century, unsuspected paths of expression and affirmation are opening up to culture, but they are only just beginning to be traveled.

Culture will face risks such as the humanists of our times, among them some of the most significant, are beginning to point out to us: the backwardness and emptiness that can be experienced by the humanities and their dissociation from the rate of change of the human mind because of scientific and technological development, and on the other hand, from the rate of transformation of human life as a result of economic and social development.

In this regard, one of the greatest challenges we will face in the twenty-first century will be to save the differences and fractures between the scientific and technological field and the humanistic and artistic field, avoiding the tension that many thinkers today consider is capable of leading to a crisis within contemporary culture and thought.

If we do not recognize the need to establish or deepen these links between diverse orders, that is, if we do not act to situate cultural work at the same pace as the changes affecting the world, perhaps today more than ever we would run the risk of also seeing an unsurmountable gap arising between economics and cultural development; between globalization and cultural diversity; between education and culture; and between political development and social plurality.

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We have been told that in the coming century the reshaping of the world order will depend less on ideological, political and economic particularities between peoples than on cultural ones, that is to say, that the cultural borders or those of civilizations will tend to appear with greater force than political or economic ones. If this is so, there would be many reasons to channel cultural forces toward affirmation of local and national identities without exclusivity or confrontation, but rather for the benefit of a pluralistic and multicultural world that is truly capable not only of accepting worldwide development trends, but also of reinforcing them and giving them a fully human orientation.

We therefore believe it is urgent to enrich and seriously and carefully review the cultural agenda that has prevailed in recent years. Beyond the major topics that have marked it in the recent past and that will continue to be valid for a long time, it is advisable today to include in them the rigorous consideration of the tendencies that can already be seen in all the essential fields of human development and that will lead in the twenty-first century to changes as deep as those of other times which have marked human history.

A meeting such as the one we are beginning today ratifies the commitment of many countries to this reflection of major importance for their shared future project. In this regard it is a question not only of a reflection at the end of the century, aimed at evaluating what the twentieth century was and what it left us, but also of a reflection at the beginning of a new millennium that is able to visualize what is to come.

We believe that the three major topics of work and discussion proposed for this meeting, “Heritage at the End of the Century,” “Actors in Culture” and “Challenges of Culture in a global era” include many of the concerns, ideas and proposals that will also be discussed in the near future as central points in the analysis of cultural policy and its decisive role in the development of the new configuration of the world.

In this regard, they can be a good means of continuing the dialogue begun one year ago in Ottawa and, at the same time, an excellent opportunity to enter new fields that are equally fundamental and necessary for the reflection that brings us together in this forum.

We are most grateful to all of you for your presence and your participation in this second Informal Meeting which we will hold here in Mexico and which, with the interest, collaboration and enthusiasm of all, will undoubtedly represent a step forward in the consolidation and permanence of this forum in favor of international cultural dialogue.

With this certainty, there is nothing more for me to do but to declare, today Monday September 20, 1999 in this Santo Domingo Cultural Center of the city of Oaxaca, the work of the second Informal Meeting of the Network on Cultural Policies formally open.

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